He looked up.
Their eyes met.
The moment lasted no longer than a breath, yet Aingeal felt it to her fingertips. Nothing in his face changed enough for another person to notice. That was his gift and his cruelty both. But she saw the stillness that entered him. The way his gaze held hers a fraction too long.
Then he inclined his head like any courteous man and turned back to the priest.
Her pulse did not settle for several minutes. She made herself attend to grain tallies, winter stores, and the families sheltered after the raid. She answered questions. Gave orders. Heard Tomas recite figures.
All the while, she knew precisely where Donal stood. When he moved, she felt it before she looked. When he spoke, evento another, she heard the tone of his voice beneath every other sound.
It was intolerable.
It was glorious.
It was the sort of thing foolish women turned into songs once good sense had failed them entirely.
The first true work of the day came from the western families. Two households displaced by the raid had been put in storage rooms near the lower hall. They needed blankets, places by the hearths, grain, reassurance, and men posted along the road so they would believe returning home would not mean walking back into fear.
Aingeal went to them herself.
Donal followed without being asked.
That should have irritated her. Instead, it comforted her.
The older widow, Aoife, stood with both hands folded over her apron, her mouth pressed into a line too proud to tremble. A boy clung to her skirt. Another woman nursed an infant beneath a frayed shawl. They looked at Aingeal with the raw exhaustion of people who had not lost everything but had lost enough to make the world feel newly unsafe.
“We will repair the roof,” Aingeal told them. “Until then, you will stay inside the castle walls. You will receive grain from the lower stores. Firewood from the north stack. Seamus will post two men along the lane.”
Aoife’s eyes filled. “Thank you, m’lady.”
Aingeal nodded. “You belong to this land.”
The woman’s mouth trembled.
Donal stepped beside Aingeal then. Not in front of her. Beside her.
“I will inspect the holding before dusk,” he said. “If there are tracks left, we will know whether they mean to return.”
Aoife looked up at him, wary at first. Then something in his manner made her nod.
The boy at the woman’s skirt stared at Donal’s sword.
Donal noticed and lowered himself to one knee. “A sword is not the first thing that keeps a house standing,” he said.
The boy frowned. “What is?”
“People who come back after it burns.”
Later, in the training yard, she found Donal with the boys again. His sleeve was rolled, the bandage hidden beneath linen and leather. Seamus barked at one lad for planting his feet too narrowly. The boy reddened and tried again too fast.
Donal stepped in.
“Not your arm,” he said. “Your balance.”
He moved the boy’s foot with the side of his boot. “Again.”
The second attempt was better.
